This is a really crazy story and most of you won’t understand the gravity until you take a look at the video. Props to CBS News for reporting this and props to R.Brown for sending it to me…
(CBS) Carmelo Rodriguez was dancing with his niece just last year. By all accounts Rodriguez, a 29-year old, loved life, his family and the Marine Corps. He was also an artist, a father, and a part-time actor. He once appeared with Katie Holmes in a scene on the TV series Dawson’s Creek. An image of Sgt. Rodriguez with his Marine buddies in Iraq in 2005 shows him as a fit, gung-ho platoon leader. CBS News correspondent Byron Pitts met Rodriguez two months ago. That once-buff physique had been whittled down to less than 80 pounds in 18 months by stage 4 melanoma. He was surrounded by family, including his 7-year-old son holding his hand. It was Rodriguez’s idea we meet. When Sgt. Rodriguez was in Iraq, military doctors, he says, misdiagnosed his skin cancer. They called it “a wart.”Eight minutes after Pitts met Sgt. Carmelo Rodriguez, and CBS News was preparing to interview him, he died.
Unfortunately the only thing holding the Rodriguez family up is Feres Doctrine, a 1950 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that bars active-duty military personnel and their families from suing the federal government for injuries incidental to their service. In other words, unlike every other U.S. citizen, people in the military cannot sue the federal government for medical malpractice….which is an obvious ploy by the government to cover their own ass.
The Carmelo Rodriguez Military Medical Accountability Act of 2009, a bill authored by Congressman Maurice Hinchey has been approved by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law. It would enable family of Sgt. Carmelo Rodriguez and others to hold military accountable for negligent medical care…